A Unified Analysis Of Free Relatives And Comparative Correlatives In English And Chinese

Comparative Correlative (CC) constructions in English and in Chinese have a lot in common concerning their external structures as well as their internal ones. Both structures contain two clauses in which one behaves like a subordinate clause and the other a main clause; paired elements appear in these structures, that is, there are paired markers "the +comparative" in English and "...yue..., ...yue..." in Chinese; The paired markers have almost the same syntactic functions in the sentences.On the other hand, another constructions, FRs, share somewhat similar properties with the CCs. They are alike with regard to the syntactic distribution, the liking devices and the semantic relationship between the two clauses in the sentence.Based on the above facts, this study aims to give a unified analysis of the comparative correlative (CC) construction and the free relative (FR) construction in English and Chinese by finding the answers to the following questions: (1) Why are there paired markers in all the constructions except in English FRs? (2) What are the linguistic mechanisms among these constructions? (3) What is the internal structure of CCs in English? Is "the comparative" part base-generated there or is it the result of movement?The results show FRs and CCs are two constructions that use the same linking mechanism to connect the two clauses which display a certain syntactic and semantic dependency relationship. They can, therefore, be given a unified analysis, on the basis of which the two constructions are generalized as one maximal projection adjoining to another maxiamal projection, thus forming a balcony position in the sense of Chomsky (1981a).